Boosting Productivity for Financial Success and Personal Development

Alignment of thoughts with focus and goals gives greater chances than any app of boosting productivity for financial success and personal development.

Boosting Productivity Adds Mental Smarts to Technological Apps

Financial success and personal development are attainable through boosting productivity by controlling thoughts, fine-tuning focus and identifying appropriate goals, according to an article published for the May 2016 issue of Money magazine.

The information becomes a reader-wide share with Scott Medintz, greater New York City area-based content strategist, editor and writer, publishing “Simple Steps To Get More Done.” It comes from interviewing a productivity expert who is both bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times.

Charles Duhigg describes his investigations in Smarter Faster Better, published by Random House on March 8, 2016, and his observations in the interview for Money magazine. He explains, from personal experience, that “Anyone can learn to become more productive” since “The key is that you have to learn how your brain works.”

Boosting productivity follows from understanding the brain, focus and goals, not from using apps since the interview reveals that “Technology that was supposed to help, didn’t.”

Self-control generates self-motivation: “[F]eeling like you’re in control turns out to be critical for triggering self-motivation -- initiative -- which, in turn, is critical for productivity.” It heads unproductivity toward productivity since control facilitates proactivity whereas “If you don’t have this sense of control, you’re simply reacting to things in your environment.” The interview indicates that the “brain craves control” and that people can learn “to emotionally crave that control, and they will develop this bias toward action.”

Encouraging a personal preference for control juxtaposes experiences with feelings since “You give people experiences where they can take control and learn how good it feels.”

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg ~ Available now via Amazon

Parents often keep clear lists of acceptable and unacceptable uses of allowances “to teach our kids the right things to do – but it’s the wrong instinct.” Boosting productivity instead leads to children deciding since “it’s important that they learn what it feels like to make decisions, even if they’re sometimes bad ones.” The interview mentions, with the example of self-motivating to reply to “a million emails,” assembly-line style, that “Getting over that hump is the important first step.”

Self-control and self-motivation, for long- and short-term sustainability, need to be bolstered by meaningful answers to such questions as “Why am I doing what I’m doing?”

Self-questioning offers reminders of routine task completion and opens new, useful neural pathways “instead of pathways that just sort of happen in reaction to the world.”

"I spoke to Money Magazine about the craving for control, inner dialogues, and avoiding the dreaded "splurchase" at the grocery store."

Charles Duhigg/Facebook post april 20, 2016, @ 12:21 p.m.

Boosting Productivity Deserves All the Scenarios Life Offers

Self-control, self-motivation and self-questioning produce the same substantial, successful, sustained results regardless of whether boosting productivity relates to financial, personal or professional endeavors, focuses or goals.

Reactive behaviors, emotions and thoughts quaver before distractions while proactivity holds fast to focusing upon reasons for compiling pre-shopping lists and visualizing results of attending meetings.

Budgeting and economic decision-making and financial and retirement planning require committing numerical and textual information to memory and scrutinizing gains and losses, inflows and outflows. Their success stands to benefit just as much from aligning mindsets, priorities and results and from auto-talking and self-writing as career paths and personal development do.

Boosting productivity by interacting with data, events and ideas ultimately takes less time by revealing “patterns in ways that you can use to make better decisions.”